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nVent Insights: Data Center Innovation

Content streaming, online banking, cloud computing, sophisticated smart phone apps, eCommerce, edge computing, artificial intelligence and more are fueling data processing and traffic demand in data centers throughout the world.

HOW WE APPROACH INNOVATION, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND SUSTAINABILITY FOR DATA CENTERS

By Aravind Padmanabhan, nVent chief technology officer

Content streaming, online banking, cloud computing, sophisticated smart phone apps, eCommerce, edge computing, artificial intelligence and more are fueling data processing and traffic demand in data centers throughout the world. The internet and the cloud can seem like abstract concepts, but those technologies are powered by physical data centers that enable so much of what we do every day.

Those data centers need to be protected. For our data center customers, nVent is a problem-solving company. Our customers come to us with visions of what they want their data centers to be able to do and we help develop the infrastructure to support those visions. It’s about more than selling products, it’s about how we diagnose, design for and solve a wide range of customer problems.

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

Our work in the data center space begins with our innovative technology. We treat data center solutions holistically. For our customers, servers are mission critical assets. They need access control, efficient and effective power distribution and reliable cooling systems. We integrate rack technology with cooling to create safe haven environments for advanced IT equipment to run uninterrupted 24/7.

At nVent, we have made some of our greatest innovations in the data center cooling industry. As servers and IT equipment take on increasing operating loads generated by greater demand from users, they generate more heat. Data center customers require more and more advanced cooling solutions at both the rack level and the row level. Densely packed server racks impede airflow and air cooling cannot always handle these high heat loads efficiently, or at all. Liquid cooling is the right solution for many of our customers. It offers effective and efficient cooling for IT equipment because heat transfers much more efficiently to liquid than to air. This helps data centers run more equipment closer together while keeping heat loads under control.

Modern IT equipment is increasingly being developed with liquid cooling in mind and requires it to run effectively. However, many data centers were not built to support liquid lines running throughout the facility. At nVent, we have developed bolt-on, modular liquid cooling solutions that convey the benefits of liquid cooling to IT equipment while operating in a traditional, air-cooled environment. We can help customers at all stages: whether they still use 100% air cooling or are running liquid lines to every single rack; whether they are looking for standardized solutions or require a custom design.

We are also seeking opportunities to augment our offerings with thoughtful partnership opportunities. Recently, we announced a strategic investment and plans for enhanced collaboration with Iceotope Technologies Ltd., which will further integrate Iceotope’s precision immersion cooling solutions with our holistic suite of accessories, power distribution and advanced liquid cooling products.

SUSTAINABLE DATA CENTERS

There is a bigger picture to innovation in the data center industry as well: sustainability. The need for more sustainable data center solutions that can run powerful IT equipment without vastly expanding physical footprint or energy use is one of the main drivers of innovation in the industry.

Advanced liquid cooling offers far superior Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) compared to industry averages. PUE describes how much of the energy coming into a data center is put towards powering IT equipment, so any energy that needs to be used on facility or equipment cooling counts negatively towards that value. Facilities with better PUE are inherently more efficient, since any energy they are bringing in is used to create computational power instead of powering cooling systems. Liquid cooling can also help data centers increase rack density, fitting more servers in the same space and reducing the need for increasing physical footprint.

We are always looking for ways to help our customers operate more efficiently and reduce their impact on natural resources. This work is an essential part of our business, not just in data centers, but across everything we do at nVent.

END-TO-END CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

nVent is an end-to-end data center solutions provider with a large range of products that we put to work addressing our customers' needs. We have a great track record of solving complicated problems for large data center customers and the breadth and depth of our offerings makes us uniquely well-equipped to meet their specific needs. We develop and implement solutions that enable big tech companies to drive innovations through hyperscale data centers, cloud computing and more.

But the future for nVent is not just in large, custom data center projects. As we think about what comes next for us, we are thinking about ways to scale to make doing business with nVent easy and frictionless for every data center customer, no matter the size of their business.

As the world continues to electrify and reliance on the internet and the cloud continues to increase, smaller data centers, edge data centers, in-house company data rooms and more will require advanced cooling technology to run next generation IT equipment. These trends require us to ask ourselves important questions about how we serve our customers now and how we can do better in the future: What standardized products can we offer? How do we serve our customers more digitally? How do we make ourselves a better choice for edge data centers?

Answering these questions requires examining our entire customer experience from specification to installation and continuing our emphasis on building consumer-like e-customer experiences in the B2B space. This means better digital configuration tools to help our customers choose from standard products or order customized ones—tools like sustainability and energy efficiency calculators, drag-and-drop stencils for design software like Autodesk Revit and automatic quoting for customized solutions. Advances in these tools allow data center operators to have all the information they need about nVent products at their fingertips.

We will never stop thinking about the experience for our data center customers. We know how important these digital tools and experiences will be for us as we continue to grow our business.

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